Although admired for his contribution to poetry — among other things, he founded the imagist movement — Ezra Pound was also considered a controversial figure for his erratic personality and the political views he expressed during World War II. Pound saw the poet as a "guide and lamp of civilization," and into his best-known work, the 800-page Cantos, he poured his knowledge of philosophy, economics, art, and history. However divided his critics, Pound's bold theories and poetic experiments set the standards of modernism.

A haunting photograph of Pound in his later years greets you on Michael Eiichi Hishikawa's Pound page. Hishikawa, an associate professor of American Literature, also presents a biography and
an extensive bibliography of Pound criticism.

T. S. Eliot called Pound "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." Explore how Pound and other American writers were influenced by Far East art and literature at the online version of "Petals on a Wet Black Bough: American Modernist Writers and the Orient," presented by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University.

Did Pound contribute to the end of the Gutenberg era? Read Edwin J. Barton's revealing article on Pound's nine-year correspondence with Marshall McLuhan in the premiere issue of the University of Toronto's McLuhan Studies.

The Spotlight on Voices & Visions is inspired by programs from Voices & Visions.